New at Reason

May 1, 2007

Jesse Walker's salute to Jack Valenti is rated PG-13, for images that might disturb minors.

Comments

ed|5.1.07 @ 4:18PM|#

Valenti is rated X, for x-pired.

|5.1.07 @ 4:20PM|#

Wow, interesting story about the guy who made the Spirit of '76 and another reason to hate that MF Woodrow Wilson.

Bee|5.1.07 @ 5:32PM|#

Ted Stevens is an utter tool.

|5.1.07 @ 5:40PM|#

That article stands to remind us how incredibly good we have it today, compared to, say, the early 20th century. Whining about the oppression of today's movie-makers is like whining about how hard it is to keep myself well-fed.

Ummm... not to say that we should stop railing against injustice when things improve shockingly quickly...

|5.1.07 @ 9:40PM|#

I remember when the PG rating was known as "M" rating, which meant "Mature." This led to more than one film review in which it was implied that the M rating was inappropriate, because nobody with any maturity would want to see it!

Then came Parental Guidance, resulting in the quip "If you had any parental guidance, you wouldn't be here in the first place . . ."

PG-13 = "If you are older than a 13-year-old, you probably don't want to see this one."

I appreciate the rating system, which gives at least SOME idea what the film is like. It's nice to know that a particular movie might not be one that I'd take a date to (R-rating) -- or, for that matter, than the thing is poorly written (so they threw in some garbage to get the R rating). If you look at the classic films, the greatest films, very few wouldn't have a PG-13, PG or even a G rating.

|5.1.07 @ 10:35PM|#

"In more recent years, it seemed strange that when would-be censors attacked films they judged too erotic or violent, the chief spokesman for free speech would often be Valenti, the creator of a ratings system that routinely enforces repressive and inconsistent standards. But he was hardly the first man to play that contradictory role. [etc]"

As the article itself makes clear, there's nothing "contradictory" about an industry opposing government censorship by actively working to clean up its act so as to remove the excuse or temptation for censorship. Also, government censorship wasn't the only threat. The Legion of Decency had the backing of the Catholic Church in calling for the boycott of indecent movies.

I suppose that the NRA [the New Deal cartel legislation, not the gun group] may have played a role in encouraging the stricter standards in 1934, but why did these strict standards persist even after the Supreme Court killed the NRA shortly thereafter? I think the threat of [non-state] boycotts had as much of an effect in getting the industry to clean itself up as the threat of govt censorship.

Incidentally, let's not automatically assume that the New Deal Decade was wholly a dark time of censorship. Congress reformed the obscenity laws in 1932 so that judges, not Customs administrators, made decisions about what literature was obscene. That's how *Ulysses* got in front of judges who cleared it for importation.

Jesse Walker|5.1.07 @ 11:20PM|#

As the article itself makes clear, there's nothing "contradictory" about an industry opposing government censorship by actively working to clean up its act so as to remove the excuse or temptation for censorship.

The contradiction was laid out in the second paragraph of the article: "Each system was different from the others, but all embodied the same paradox: They were formed to fend off public censorship, but it was the threat of public censorship that gave them their power." I should note that Howe sometimes described even voluntary self-censorship as a potential threat to freedom, even as he chastised his group for not being self-censorious enough when confronted with Birth of a Nation.

Also, government censorship wasn't the only threat. The Legion of Decency had the backing of the Catholic Church in calling for the boycott of indecent movies.

The Legion of Decency, by then renamed the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, continued to "condemn" films it found objectionable after the MPAA rating system was adopted. Incidentally, the man who took charge of the Production Code Authority in 1934 and ran it for the next two decades, Joseph I. Breen, was closely aligned with the Legion of Decency.

I suppose that the NRA [the New Deal cartel legislation, not the gun group] may have played a role in encouraging the stricter standards in 1934, but why did these strict standards persist even after the Supreme Court killed the NRA shortly thereafter?

For a number of reasons, including the threat of censorship by act of Congress and the possibility of further censorship on the state and municipal level. It's telling that the first major crack in the Code -- Otto Preminger's The Moon is Blue -- came just a year after the Supreme Court ruled such censorship unconstitutional.

For a terrific account of how the Code came to be (and of the sort of films that were made before it grew teeth), I highly recommend Thomas Doherty's book Pre-Code Hollywood.

|5.2.07 @ 2:27AM|#

I may look at that Thomas Doherty book.

Even with my limited study of the subject, I'm aware of the synergy between private and govt censorship. My basic source has been *The Censorship Papers* (and "making of" supplemental material in rented CDs of movies). The threat of a Catholic boycott seemed to be very big - a key reason to hire Breen. Nowadays, the Church doesn't do boycotts - the bishops do movie review instead, see

http://www.usccb.org/movies/

The main, constantly repeated theme by the author of *The Censorship Papers* was that, freed from the horrible Hays Code, movies would finally be able to fulfill their artistic responsibility to show "realism" on the screen. As a reminder of how realistic modern movies are without the Hays Code restrictions, see

http://tinyurl.com/2vrnn2

|5.2.07 @ 3:17AM|#

An interesting article on early-mid 20th century government political film censorship in BC, Canada:


http://doiop.com/bccensorship

|5.2.07 @ 3:37AM|#

Wow - he would have been really interested in
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Jesse Walker|5.2.07 @ 9:06AM|#

Don't get me wrong, Max: The threat of Catholic boycott definitely played a role. Another factor I didn't mention in the article was the extra cost of creating different edits for different jurisdictions with different regulations, making it more convenient to have a standardized set of rules. There were some pseudoscientific arguments about the alleged effects of movies on young viewers, too.

Bryan Alexander|5.3.07 @ 8:21AM|#

Excellent article, Jesse. I blogged up some comments at Infocult.

One point for Reason to repeat here: a really interesting case of the new medium upon which censors are seizing now is computer gaming. That's getting the full treatment you describe, including industrial self-regulation, continual threats from governments federal and local, collaboration or coincidence between left and right, social science being flung around, etc.